Food for thought and water for the drought...

Something that I hadn't accounted for before I came to India was how a new environment makes perfectly functional, sometimes highly efficient systems completely obsolete or irrelevant.

The other day I took out a pack of chewing gum from my bag to clean my palette after a delicious meal and its melted into a clump of goo and sticks to my fingers! I had brought a boat load of electronic gizmos (at least by my standards it was a boatload) and a few days in my newly refurbished bedroom and the laptop has scratches and dirt streaks on it, the E-reader has a coating of dust on its screen. My beautiful, delicate looking white blouse, bought for the hot climate is suddenly a dirty brown colour.

On another note, but the same song...the birds and flying squirrels (so says the newspaper) are dying of dehydration; people have been encouraged to leave out shallow bowls of water for them (the birds, not the squirrels that is). Who said humanity is dead?

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The Obstacle Course to Being

Today, I got news that a close friend is in the early days of what might be a difficult pregnancy. Richard Dawkins’ opening remarks of his book “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder” came to mind. He marvels at how statistic-numbingly lucky each one of us is to have survived the odds of a sperm and a ovum fusing and giving rise to a living cell. How we are a nanoscopically small number of the total combinations that are possible for the human genome. But as a developmental biologist, for me, this is just the starting point of the great obstacle course. The hurdles that the embryo will clear in the mother’s womb to make it to light and sunshine, warmth and fragrance, and the colours and music of this, our second home. We see numerous reminders of each step that falters, in the birth defects that abound our world (according to statistics, 3-6% of infants born). A less than perfect infant brings anguish for the mother and potential disa...

Autism: Accepting our differences

April is Autism Awareness Month Priyam was the life of the party at the day care centre. A bright-eyed boy who captured the heart of the caretakers and played with abandon. Sometime after his second birthday, all this started changing. He stopped playing with his toys, he seemed more interested in organizing them now. He stopped talking, not even responding even when called by name. He stopped smiling at people and making eye contact. Then the rhythmic movements started; rocking his body, banging his head or repeatedly tapping on the table. One day he banged his head so much that when his father came hurriedly summoned by the caretaker, there was a trickle of blood running down his face. That was his last day at the centre; they refused to keep him after that. Nancy was different. Growing up in a family with siblings and grandparents, she was used to people. But outsiders were studiously ignored. She heard all the questions and comments, but never acknowledged them. Loud noises, r...

Real or Imagined?

Real or Imagined? Right now I have a time-lapse experiment in progress at home. An infant beginning to appreciate that a person disappearing behind the curtain is not gone, just hidden; now a toddler who enlists me in pretend-play. The neuronal circuits necessary for imagination are busy being built. The history of western art charts an analogous course for human civilization. Early examples of art relied heavily on ‘true-to-type’ representation of reality. From ancient Greece to Rome to Renaissance, art was all about how well you could recreate in stone or canvas what you see, as you see it. Parisians graduated to Impressionism when one day in 1874, Claude Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise’ (Impression, soleil levant) was unveiled. A few seemingly random strokes of paint on canvas, enough for us to visualize the luminescent descent of the sun into the sea, was equated to an unfinished wallpaper by the art connoisseurs of 19th century. How is it that a few daubs of pain...

PEREGRINATIONS

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